Concept
The MIT Senseable City Laboratory is a digital laboratory within MIT's City Design and Development group, within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, which works in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab. The lab aims to investigate and anticipate how digital technologies are changing the way people live and their implications at the urban scale. Director Carlo Ratti founded the Senseable City Lab in 2004. Its mission statement says that it seeks to creatively intervene and investigate the interface between people, technologies and the city. The Lab's work draws on diverse fields such as urban planning, architecture, design, engineering, computer science, natural science and economics to capture the multi-disciplinary nature of urban problems and deliver research and applications that empower citizens to make choices to make a better liveable urban experience. Among the Lab's partners are a group of corporations, including AT&T, General Electric, Audi, ENEL, SNCF as well as cities such as Copenhagen, London, Singapore, Seattle, and Florence. Projects have included "The Copenhagen Wheel", which debuted at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, "Trash_Track" shown at the Architectural League of New York and the Seattle Public Library, "New York Talk Exchange" featured in the MoMA The Museum of Modern Art, and Real Time Rome, included in the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture. In 2010 the lab opened a new research center in Singapore as part of a $35 million MIT-led initiative on the Future of Urban Mobility. The Senseable City Lab begins its project and research work with a vision for an urban future, or "urban demo". This vision is tailored to a particular city's needs and can be motivated by the challenges a place may be confronting, or by opportunities for providing new experiences or services due to advances in digital technologies. Urban demos are designed to be showcased at large public events and exhibitions to stimulate debate between citizens, public administrators, and industry.